This is Laura Loomer we’re talking about, though, not some pundit across the aisle with whom Kristof simply “disagree[s].” She’s the 33-year-old self-styled investigative journalist who, through a combination of incendiary rhetoric and a close relationship with President Trump, successfully polices the MAGA movement. Understandably, she is — or at least, used to be —  a long-time enemy of the mainstream establishment.

Loomer has a history of rhetoric that should disqualify her from any favorable mention from Kristof. On Oct. 9, 2023, she tweeted: “The people in GAZA were given plenty of time to evacuate. Israel is going to burn it to the ground today and it will be uninhabitable, which is the way it should be. Watch today for jihadist sympathizers online who cry about ‘human rights violations’ and ‘genocide.’ Those people are terrorist enablers.… If all of the Islamic neighboring nations care about the people in Gaza so much, then they can open their borders and take them. But not even the neighboring Islamic nations want those people. That’s the elephant in the room, right? Nobody wants them because they behave like barbaric wild animals.”

Her posting habits haven’t changed much since. Last month, Loomer tweeted: “Ban Muslims from holding office in America.” Adding, “this time, make it a Muslim Ban as it was intended to be. Not an Islamic travel ban.” And last week, she suggested that she should become Secretary of Homeland Security. 

“I promise you I will actually make ICE the paramilitary force it should have always been to round up and forcefully remove jihadist invaders and Third World illegal aliens from our country. I will get the job done.” (The job’s current occupant, Markwayne Mullin, is apparently insufficiently anti-Muslim, having met with the Qataris.) DHS Secretary Loomer’s first order of business would be to send Leftist uncle-nephew commentator duo Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker “back to Turkey.” 

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Loomer warned that, should Kamala Harris become president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Among those who rebuked her for her comment was the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called Loomer “toxic.” (As it happens, Loomer has reportedly mused about taking up Graham’s role as national uber-hawk in the wake of the senator’s death.) Or take how, two years earlier, she attended a white-nationalist convention and attempted to appeal to them, notwithstanding their hatred for Jews like herself: “I consider myself to be a white advocate.” 

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Loomer used to be vehemently critical of Ukraine and its wartime president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But as the Trump administration has changed its position, Loomer has shifted, too — to enthusiastic endorsement of the war. And so, in the latter half of July, she went on a trip to Ukraine and later released a 45-minute, overwhelmingly softball interview with Zelensky. While she was there, a sequence of “respectable” liberals, center-Left and center-Right alike, forgot their misgivings to loudly celebrate her. 

On a CNN panel on July 23, a day before Loomer released the interview, the network’s anti-Trump but Right-tilting commentator S.E. Cupp argued: “If she’s gonna do propaganda, I’d rather it be Zelensky’s version of propaganda than Putin’s.” Cupp, praising Loomer, additionally intoned, “It’s one thing to be a keyboard warrior; it’s easy to say things from the safety of the patio at Mar-A-Lago. It’s much different when you go to a place.” 

Erin Burnett, who was moderating the panel (and who herself conducted a more-than-flattering interview with Zelensky back in 2023), then turned to former Obama adviser David Axelrod. Burnett noted that Loomer “had these opinions on Ukraine which were based on propaganda and a lack of any kind of experience there” — before rather quickly listing some of her more controversial comments. Axelrod, in response, opined on Zelensky sitting down with Loomer: “My goodness, the things one has to do to save their country.”  

Other prestigious outlets and personalities have also changed their tune on Loomer. Peter Harrell of the Carnegie Endowment said that her ideological shift and her interview with Zelensky were “a powerful reminder of the importance of being open to engaging with people you might profoundly disagree with.” The journalist Eli Lake, writing in The Free Press, hailed Laura Loomer as a “lifelong learner.” Batya Ungar-Sargon, the self-described “MAGA Lefty” who has attacked Trump World racism in the past, amicably interviewed Loomer following her return to the United States. And just this week, Neera Tanden — president of the Center for American Progress, the Clintonian think tank — retweeted Loomer.

Loomer is far from the only unhinged character feted by respectable liberals in recent months. Her coastal-cosmopolitan mirror is Masih Alinejad, another online activist and self-described journalist. Born in Iran but based in New York, Alinejad has made a career, partially bankrolled by the US government, in being an Iranian emigre who says precisely the right thing from a feminist perspective for Western hawks. 

Alinejad’s first New York Times op-ed appeared in July 2018. Bari Weiss, then an opinion editor at the paper, enthused on Twitter: “Her name should be known by anyone who describes herself as a feminist.” Alinejad returned to the paper of record in January 2026 — to make a human-rights case for war with Iran. Lamenting that Trump hadn’t yet bombed her home country, she concluded, “inaction has a body count.”

Regardless of what she’s talking about, Alinejad’s dominant mode is theatrical. We’ve seen her weep with joy on the city streets over the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We’ve also seen her in a bathing suit doing a cold plunge alongside a man to demonstrate that she couldn’t legally do the same in Iran. These are perfectly understandable reactions for a woman who has suffered under the Islamist tyranny of the mullahs. The problem is that her dramatic mode of expression is used to legitimize a massively unpopular war, which has plunged Washington into yet another Middle East quagmire. 

When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, she took to Weiss’s CBS News to sarcastically offer him a spot in one of her “safe houses” — she claims to have been targeted by the Iranian regime, and to be under constant threat of assassination. Recently, she threw a fit about her Citi Bike not working, because Mamdani would rather arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than see to basic services functioning. Never mind that the Citi Bike program is privately operated by Lyft and therefore doesn’t fall under the mayor’s purview. And she’s unabashed by her errors: she went on Persian-language media in the aftermath of the US attack on the Minab girls’ school that claimed 175 lives, to recant her support for the war. “It’s obvious I’ll sometimes be wrong,” she said in Persian. 

Despite such incoherencies, Alinejad gets invited to places like the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she broke into song (poorly), supposedly to test whether any men in the crowd would get “aroused.” Women in the Islamic Republic are not officially allowed to sing solo in public. This was intended to be a demonstration of the evil of the Iranian regime, which is understandable, but all Iranian men seemed to fall into the dragnet of her condemnation. “Men are the problem,” she said and pointed to her co-panelist, the Iranian-born Leftist essayist Arash Azizi (an UnHerd contributor). Azizi had suggested that Iran should not be kicked out of FIFA over the country’s restrictions on female spectators at sporting events. “These are the men in my country. My women go to stadium; they get killed,” Alinejad said. 

Both of these activists, Loomer and Alinejad, are often ridiculous in their self-presentation and sketchy on their facts, so why do respectable news organizations champion them, and what does it say about American liberal institutions’ claims to “respectability”?

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The mainstream is being especially kind to Loomer right now. The AP, which is supposed to be a neutral news wire, spoke to Loomer in a Kiev bomb shelter, a story that made its front page on July 26. “Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged,” was the most critical note in the AP’s report — referring to how, when Loomer initially arrived in Kiev, she posted, “One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here.” 

The AP should have also acknowledged that Loomer’s defense of Ukraine is at least partially on racial grounds: she believes in a “based” Aryan Ukraine in opposition to an Asiatic, Eastern Russia. Loomer’s original tweet about there not being “a single Muslim” in Ukraine made oppositional reference to an old Putin remark from 2015, that “Islam plays [an] important role in Russia.” But the AP left that out, only focusing on the comfortable pro-war-with-Russia crossover.

Ukraine does have a native, Muslim minority in its Tatars, and the drone factory Loomer visited there, pledging to “kill Russians” in honor of Sen. Graham, is owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov, in case his last name doesn’t give it away, is a Muslim. Loomer appeared to be unaware of the connection. 

One possibility is that the people who work for news organizations, all products of America’s liberal class, are either subconsciously or knowingly reinforcing Washington’s overarching view of the world. Loomer is now saying what we like, so let’s boost her. Take, once more, CNN. This was the network that, during Trump 1.0, ran ads about how “this is an apple,” no matter how many people “scream ‘banana, banana, banana’ over and over and over again.” The implication being that MAGA — those low-class news-questioners — wanted you to believe the apple was a banana. 

Nine years on, “banana screamers” who advance US geopolitical aims appear to be better than those who don’t.

The “centrist respectability” was always a lie. Because their interests now align, Loomer, like Alinejad before her, gains the endorsement, however uneasily or cheekily, of the US liberal establishment. It would be difficult to provide a better example of unquestioning adherence to dogma. Geopolitics trumps all.

“Kamala [Harris] leaning all in on starting many new bloody wars in the Middle East,” wrote Stephen Miller on X, adding in a different post: “Kamala’s closing pitch: INVADE THE MIDDLE EAST!” And again: “Trump will end and prevent war in the Middle East.” Laura Loomer — the 9/11 truther and Mar-a-Lago regular — warned that a Harris presidency would not only saturate the White House with the scent of curry, but risk triggering “WORLD WAR III.”

Yet MAGA today is arguably the most hawkish faction on the American scene. Its ideologues — not least Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer — braid a run of unrelated conflicts, foreign and domestic, into a single struggle against what the administration calls “Third Worldism”: a nebulous enemy category encompassing Iran and the Eurasian great powers, Latin American Leftists and drug-traffickers, Somali migrants, and the Zohran Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party.

The bitter truth, especially for those of us who once saw promise in conservative populism, is that the movement was always structurally vulnerable to this turn.

Eighteen months in office, the second Trump administration has waged a full-on war with Iran, while largely abandoning the diplomatic track on Ukraine. Team Trump, moreover, has racked up various “smaller” interventions: regime change in Venezuela (and, perhaps soon, Cuba); bombings in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Ecuador; and a lawless campaign of strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that has killed more than 200. 

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How did we get here?

Part of it has to do with the nature of the Republican Party and its mighty donor class. The “restraint” faction — conservatives who advocate a lighter footprint abroad, or who insist that Washington conserve scarce resources for the rivalry with China — locked down many national-security jobs in the new administration. But assistant secretaries of this-and-that don’t write checks, and they can’t get the commander in chief on the phone the way, say, Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress and pro-Israel mega-donor, can.

Then there is GOP coalitional politics. The South has been a party stronghold since the 1960s at the presidential level and, since the ’90s, down the ballot. As blue states and cities have declined, the region has drawn people, capital, dynamism, and, with them, political power. As the writer Michael Lind has noted, the South is also home to a more martial culture than much of the country (the late Sen. Lindsey Graham was no aberration).

Florida, especially, exerts an immense gravitational pull. It is no accident that Loomer — who has recently emerged as a champion of Ukraine after years of disparaging the country and its cause — is Florida-based. So are a host of other hawkish voices: The Babylon Bee, the satirical-ish evangelical magazine; the podcaster Dave Rubin; and many smaller stars in the pro-war constellation. And that’s not to mention Florida’s Cuban-exile population, whose omni-hawkish worldview the GOP must serve to win in the Sunshine State. For many of these figures, the “war” is one long front stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, and from thence to the Caribbean. 

But the deepest factor is ideological. Populism, almost by definition, needs an enemy — a “hegemonic formation,” as the Left theorist Chantal Mouffe puts it, against which to organize mass political energy. During his first presidential bid, Trump aimed his followers’ oppositional energy mostly against the bipartisan elites who had plunged America into pointless forever wars in the Middle East, while abandoning the working class to the vagaries of corporate globalization.

All along, though, there was another side to Trump and MAGA — the one whose critique of porous borders, a perfectly legitimate populist issue, veered into talk of immigrants as “rapists.” Beginning in the first term, as Trumpism was translated into governance, the economic populism mostly fell by the wayside. His sole legislative achievement back then was a tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. This partly owed to Trump’s own plutocratic instincts, and partly to the familiar personnel and sheer inertia of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Right’s best-organized institutions set about healing these ruptures — refitting populism to the old agenda of oligarchic economics and pro-Israel hawkery. The National Conservatism conferences, Project 2025, and the like: in retrospect, all served this purpose.

An example is MAGA’s treatment of Big Tech. The populist problem with Big Tech had once been its overweening market power and lack of accountability; but slowly that objection morphed into decrying the use to which the firms put that domination: namely, promoting “wokeness.” Once Elon Musk owned Twitter, renamed X, the lopsided power he exercised over the platform ceased to be a problem at all. And where the MAGA Right had once faulted the “pro-war uniparty” of the Bushes and the Clintons for diving head-first into Mideast quagmires, the rhetoric shifted beginning in the second Trump administration: the sin now isn’t the breaking of nations, but bothering to rebuild afterward or pretending to care about democracy in Muslim lands.

I encountered a version of the latter firsthand, while profiling Pete Hegseth, the then-newly confirmed secretary of defense, aboard his plane on a visit to migrant-processing operations at Gitmo. He and his closest aides were keen to have me know that Hegseth is a former soldier who had learned the lessons of the post-9/11 wars. At the time, I took this to mean opposition to ill-defined missions and overreach abroad. In fact, it meant no longer bothering with even the pretense to moral universalism that had guided the earlier conflicts. Now we just blow stuff up — this, it turns out, is the “new” in the “New Right.”

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If this newly reconstituted Right isn’t in the business of doing real populism — if it indeed enjoys the backing of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Musk — then against whom can it organize its energies? Already, in the early 2020s, one could see the pseudo-populist elements of the Right road-testing “woke communism”: a category that framed the assistant professor scraping by on $30,000 a year as a subversive “elite” (while Musk came across as a subaltern hero).

More recently, the Right has settled on “Third Worldism” — a term that appears no fewer than 40 times in a new State Department document on “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism,” which elevates the puny and faltering Havana regime into a powerful enemy state that could endanger the American way of life at any minute.

The Third Worldist menace is vaguely brown, vaguely communistic, and much easier to “do” something about than confronting the internal contradictions that wrack working- and lower-middle-class America. To deal with Third Worldism abroad, you don’t have to marshal bills through Congress and strike careful compromises with Democrats. You can just fire off missiles — foreign and defense policy being the area in which the president and the executive branch enjoy a near-unchecked latitude, at least as the Constitution has been interpreted for the better part of a century. 

And it can justify a lot: brutalizing migrants almost as enemy combatants, calls to denaturalize the likes of Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar, a grinding, aimless new war in the Persian Gulf — all while covering over the failure to shift the immigration system to a skills-based one, say, or to renew the industrial base.

There is only one problem. Taken to its logical terminus, this ideological agenda will bring the United States much closer to a total conflict — World War III, if we must use Trumpy language — than anything contemplated by even old-school hawkish strategists like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Max Boot. Let alone that warmonger of Miller’s and Loomer’s 2024-era nightmares — Kamala Harris.

Yet responsible progressives and populists seeking a more restrained foreign policy would do well to study the sources of his success: how he was able to advance his expansive foreign-policy vision through the great vicissitudes of the past three decades, even as his own party’s base turned against foreign interventionism. A more restrained foreign policy won’t succeed unless the restrainers master Graham’s arts.

Graham — a son of the working class, who raised his teenaged sister after their parents died young — had an overabundance of what the ancient Greeks called phronesis: the practical wisdom essential to effective political activity. Politics is an art of prudence, of making practical judgments, adding allies, and compromising wherever possible — while putting up a fight when absolutely necessary. Principle and ideas matter, but the practicing politician can’t, and shouldn’t, hold himself to the same standards as the philosopher or even the journalist.

Graham understood this. Maybe he understood it a little too well, but in the final analysis, he got closer to the truth of politics than did most of his enemies.

Nowhere was this more apparent than his response to the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Like many others in the Republican establishment, Graham initially balked at the former New York developer and reality-TV barker’s bid to take over the party of Lincoln. “If we nominate Trump,” he warned on social media during the 2016 GOP primary, “we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

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Once Trump became inevitable, Graham made his peace. And thereafter, he remained doggedly loyal, championing most of the president’s domestic issues and rising to his personal defense in the face of the underhanded lawfare that bedeviled Trump for the better part of a decade. Graham came around forcefully in recognizing the Russiagate hoax for what it was and resisted the first impeachment attempt over Trump’s “perfect” Ukraine phone call (remember that?). The South Carolinian also understood Trump’s almost-compulsive need to vent — to have somebody around to shoot the shit with. And he made himself constantly available, over the phone and on the golf course.

Graham’s loyalty and personal warmth paid dividends and gathered compound interest, which he would then cash out when it came time to promote his pet causes. He could disagree with Trump — over his Syria withdrawal, the Afghan drawdown, and the Ukraine war — without blowing up the relationship. And during the second term, his proximity allowed him to push for the hawks’ holy grail: a full-on war with Iran.

To note all this isn’t to endorse the substance of any of these policies. But Graham’s record tends to vindicate those inside the Trump administration — many of them opposed to the late senator’s agenda — who wish restrainers in Congress could be a bit more strategic. The likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie dynamited their Trump ties over antiwar principle; Graham went to the afterlife having gotten his Iran war.

Beyond his masterful management of Trump, Graham was also a consummate legislator of the old-school, Tip O’Neill variety: clubby, compromising, and surprisingly willing to break with the Right when a measure served the national interest (by his lights). For example, he backed the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at bolstering the domestic semiconductor industry, as well as the 2022 bipartisan gun-safety bill. Such across-the-aisle efforts didn’t endear him to the small-government faithful, and he earned his 59% lifetime score from the keepers of Republican orthodoxy at Heritage Action. But bipartisanship built up political capital on the Hill that he could expend elsewhere.

Like the best of modern lawmakers, moreover, Graham was a master at directing oodles of federal development cash to his home state. Visit his X account, and you’ll see most of his feed devoted to showcasing the bacon he brought home as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee: a Coast Guard base in Charleston, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility (also in Charleston), a federal grant to replace 18 bridges across the Palmetto State, and on and on. It’s true that Graham was a beneficiary of Israel Lobby and defense-industry largess. But he likely wouldn’t get re-elected if it weren’t for his relentless developmentalism (or pork-barrel politics, if you must).

Even as he relished congressional wheeling-and-dealing, Graham could be ferocious in a fight. For my money, his single best moment as a lawmaker came during the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As the holes in rape accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s account were widening in public view, Graham publicly excoriated the Democrats who’d used her in a quest to destroy Kavanaugh.

“What you wanna do is destroy this guy’s life, hold his seat open, and hope you win in 2020,” Graham said, his body and voice shaking. “You’ve said that, not me.… I would never do to [Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor] what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.” The oration is well worth watching in full. To me, it was the decisive pivot that made Kavanaugh’s eventual confirmation possible.

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Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Graham stood for a comprehensive account of why American power is good, and what its exercise on the world stage is meant for. His worldview was, as one writer for Responsible Statecraft has noted, essentially that of an old Cold Warrior: unbending support of proxies and allies against larger nation-state adversaries, the passionate if hypocritical and uneven promotion of democracy abroad.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that worldview lost its coherence and salience. The sheer hyperactivity to which it gave rise over the past quarter-century drove Washington into more than one quagmire, dissipating American power and corroding its domestic foundations. Graham-ism has now reached its apotheosis in Trump’s Persian Gulf War III, which has forced the president to choose between prolonged economic pain or an embarrassing quick exit.

Yet the lesson for the restraint camp — my camp, as it should be clear — is that we need some larger moral vision or story, a plausible substitute for Graham-ism. “Get out of everywhere all at once” is no more credible or responsible than his “Fight everyone, everywhere, all at once.” I’m not sure we have such a substitute on hand. Likewise, if Graham overestimated the reserves of American power, I sometimes worry that the restraint camp underestimates them. The passing from the stage of the likes of Graham and Sen. Mitch McConnell provides an opening for developing such ideas and translating them into political action.

Graham’s Senate career offers a template for the sort of practical wisdom the task requires. He was as wise as a serpent, if too far from the innocence of a dove.